Plants Grow Better Listening To Black Sabbath

Do you have a green thumb but a black heart? Apparently, there’s also a dark side to mother nature, at least when it comes to the kind of music that makes plants grow.

Chris Beardshaw, a gardening expert for the BBC, did an experiment with different types of music to see what kind plants respond to. While one would imagine it as being peaceful classical music, plants actually like rock ‘n roll better.

“We set up four glasshouses with different sorts of music in to see what happened to the plants,” said Beardshaw to the Guardian via NME. “We had one that was silent – that was a control house – and we had one that was played classical music, we had one that was played Cliff Richard and we had one that was played Black Sabbath.”

“It was alstroemerias we were growing and we bombarded these glasshouses with sound for the life of the plant,” he continued. “The one that was grown with classical music — a soft, almost a caressing of the plant when it is hit with that sort of soundwave — those grew slightly shorter because of the soundwaves bombarding them and were slightly more floriferous and there was slightly less pest and disease.”

We’re not sure what that means, but Beardshaw explains it in layman’s terms, sort of. Black Sabbath equals big flowers and less disease. Soft music? Plants that committed horticultural suicide.

“And the ones with Black Sabbath — great big, thumping noise, rowdy music — they were the shortest, but they had the best flowers and the best resistance to pest and disease…The alstroemerias in the Cliff Richard house all died,” concluded Beardshaw. “Sabotage was suspected but we couldn’t prove it.”